Recession? Depression? Market adjustment?
Billion-dollar bailouts? Just what is happening to the economy? Like
the rest of the industrialized world, Canada is in the midst of an
economic crisis that is clearly of global proportions. Yet, Nobel
Prize winning economists failed to see it coming. This is
unsurprising since, in the words of the newly humble Alan Greenspan,
the crisis revealed “a flaw in the model ... that defines the way
the world works.” Bankruptcies and Bailouts explains the roots of
this economic disaster. The essays in this book show, in clear and
accessible language, that the global capitalist economy, dependent
on hyper-extended credit, fuelled by systematic deregulation and
rooted in the contradictions of a mad drive for unlimited profits,
must inevitably end up in this predicament. The authors also
demonstrate that there are ways out of this economic mess that do
not involve simply bailing out the obscenely over-paid executives
whose decisions led us to this chaos.

Contents

Cy
Gonick: Foreword

Robert Chernomas: Explaining the Economic Crisis: Class Warfare from
Reagan to Obama

David McNally: Inequality, the Profit System and the Global Crisis

Ian Hudson: From Deregulation to Crisis

John Loxley: Hyper-Credit: The Financial Dimension of the Economic
Crisis

Fletcher Baragar: Canada and the Economic Crisis–

Lynne Fernandez: We’re All Keynesians–Again

Rahdika DesaiL Keynes Redux: History Catches Up

Alan Freeman: Investing in Civilisation: What the State can do in a
Crisis